I don’t know of any connection between Taliban and ayatollahs. We’re talking of ultra-Shia and ultra-Sunni, especially with a strong tribal tint so repugnant to other Muslims. Other Muslims actually despised Taliban. Iranian ayatallahs were aiding Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb Islami whom Taliban have defeated.
There is no evience whatsoever linking Taliban to terrorism. Their invitation to Osama was a matter of hospitality, Osama’s money, and reputation. Taliban didn’t carry out a single terrorist act and cracked down on heroin before the US imposed sanctions on them. Sudan also hosted Osama; does that reasonably make Sudan a terrorist state?
Similarly, I have never heard of any substantial intermingling between Muslim Bortherhood and Taliban. You’re talking perhaps of some splinter elements from the Brotherhood, whom Sadat didn’t allow to return to Egypt. To my knowledge, mainstream Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood have nothing in common with Taliban.
Young Arabs flocked to Osama, Hekmatyar, and other jihadis well before Taliban appeared on the scene.

OK, we invade Gaza. Then what? Hamas will go underground, temporarily move to Egypt. We withdraw, they move in. We have had that with Hezbollah in 2000.
Right, Obadiah also suggests scorching a buffer zone or annexing territories in response to attacks. But the current readiness to return the Golan Heights makes that policy doubtful, IMO. Besides, I see no popular political leader capable of expansionist policy. We have to make do with the available Knesset of hoodlums. Someone like Baruch Marzel won’t miraculously gain 61 seats there. A revolt, of course, is another option.

The consequence of the Taliban having taken over Afghanistan cannot be underestimated, either, IMO. As the second Islamic fundamentalist nation (after Iran), and the first to be led by out-and-out terrorists as well as Islamofascists,[1] the Taliban control of Afghanistan gave a great psychological boost to the ayatollahs, and showed the world (and especially the old Muslim Brotherhood graduates from Egypt’s early 70s,) that jihad could successfully be exported to other countries. Without that success, it’s doubtful that so many young Arabs would have flocked to “the cause” and entered the many training camps to learn to be effective, gun-toting, bomb-setting terrorists instead of rock-throwing teenagers with wet dreams of big-breasted houris.[2]

“Rooting them [the Gazan terrorists] out is impossible for Israel,” you say, declaring it “unrealistic.” With that, too, I have to disagree, Danny. The current ridiculous regime of Osloid Olmert is utterly incapable of anything, it’s true, but that’s not the whole picture. A real Israeli government, with a set of testicles the size of a chihuahua’s, would be able to find any rocket attack on the South to be an adequate casus belli to go in with a full-scale ground invasion. An alternative policy of conditional retribution, advancing the border, say, 10 meters for every rocket that leaves Gaza, would also be difficult for other nations to gainsay, as if a really Jewish government, imbued with hadar – Jewish self respect and pride – would even care what the rest of the world has to say. Would it be easy? Heck, no. Could it be done? Heck, yes!

Anyway, this is your blog, not mine, and my own views on how to “fix” the problems in our troubled corner of the world don’t deserve an airing in Obadiah’s comment trail. Let’s just leave it as “I disagree.” I still think Obadiah is more or less in the right (tee hee) way of thinking. You, too!

Eliyahu

1) The Iranian ayatollahs have, as a group, shown themselves to be much more pragmatic and skilled players of realpolitik than their younger Islamic comrades-in-arms. To get to their positions they have mostly had to live long and “climbed the ranks,” as it where, which doubtless gives them a shrewder understanding of human nature than some wet-faced young fanatic with a big gun on his shoulder.

2) For the Straight Dope on the 72 virgins in the Muslim afterlife, read Cecil Adams.

In thinking about your essay, Obadiah, I’ve concluded that, for a change, I disagree with you completely.

I find it ironic that you are making reference to a story which most people are reading in exactly the opposite fashion, to wit, that Charlie Wilson’s War to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan ended up virtually creating the Taliban and other fundamentalist Islamic groups, including Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida, and gave them training and weapons that they eventually used back against America. One bloggist quotes Professor Abdullahi An-Na’im of Emory University Law School,

“Good intentions are not good enough, and we should always be humble and accept the possibility of being wrong. The lesson of the law of ‘unintended consequences’ of our previous policies is to realize in our current policies that ends never justify the means. Pragmatic reasons for any policy must always be consistent with moral rationale. If bad means appear to achieved good ends in the short term, then it is simply that we have failed to appreciate the real costs which in fact outweigh the presumed benefits.”

In other words, doing bad deeds will eventually harvest bad results, even if there are some intermediate good results along the way.

But we Israelis don’t need to learn the lesson of unintended consequences from Chalie Wilson’s War in Afghanistan — a close reading of our own recent history will teach us the same thing. Let us look back fifteen years … to 1992, when Yasser Arafat and the PLO, whom we’d driven out of Beirut, was living in Tunis. Abu Bint and his Fatah cohorts were under a serious cloud, having blown their little political credibility gained by speaking to Israeli representatives during (but outside of) the Madrid Conference by openly supporting Iraq and alienating the U.S. and the Europeans, and even many fellow Arabs (who’d never liked him much anyway, but now had another excuse to despise him.) Money was so tight that he put his villa in Tunis up for sale, and then there was that mysterious helicopter crash…. Life was not good for this viscious little terrorist and his band of bloodthirsty and self-serving little scum.

In the meantime, Shimon Peres was upset with Yitzhak Rabin, who was having his own problems not delivering on the promise of the Madrid Conference because there weren’t a lot of moderate “Palestinians” with whom to speak, and what they were saying was, essentially, that peace just wasn’t possible because our differences were intractable.

So while Abie Nathan is going to jail for openly meeting with Palestinians in Egypt, in violation of Israeli law, Peres encourages Yossi Beilin to meet with them in London and then in Oslo. The whole thing was probably just a ploy by Peres to trump Rabin and regain political control, while Rabin tried to ride the whirlwind to keep his cushy seat. (The Israeli Law of Inertia, “Never underestimate the power of an Israeli politician to keep his butt in his seat.“) Eventually, Israel agrees to publicly “rehabilitate” the criminals and put them in charge of the hostile Arab population in the territory won in 1967, and we have the mess with which we live today.

What this amounts to is that WE Israelis imported a bunch of thugs back into Israeli-occupied territory so that they could dominate and extort their brethren in exchange for giving us “peace and quiet” AND allowing us to “keep our hands clean” from the nasty things we had to do as “occupiers.” We brought in gangsters to do our dirty work for us, thinking that we could trust these hoodlums, who were already capable of stabbing their own people in the back, to only beat up and rob the Arabs we gave into their hands, but not have them bite our own hands, too. Does anyone remember how to spell Tanzim? Force 17?

After serious reflection, I think that your proposal, Obadiah, to arm Hamas and encourage internecine Arab warfare is a wicked idea, and will ultimately bear (more) evil fruit. If the Arabs must be killed, then we must be prepared to do it ourselves. If not, then giving someone else guns and hiring them to do the job for us not only shirks our resposibility, but it also gives them ammunition (literally) with which to shoot us later.

As any American can tell you, a real man must be prepared to shoot his own dog, and not try to pawn the job off on someone else.

Charles Wilson was a Congressman from Texas. (See his bio on Wikipedia.) He was a strong supporter of CIA backing of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet invading forces, described in the book “Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History by George Crile. The book is currently being made into a movie starring
Tom Hanks, currently scheduled for release on Christmas, 2007.